Lost Love Stories

Walking around at a flea market five years ago, I found a photo album with pictures of a couple on vacations in the region of Provence-France, probably during the 60s. They traveled alone, isolated from the rest of the world, taking photographs of each other in the fields, on seashores, cities, historic sites and other landscapes. There were no pictures in which they appeared together, indicating that they hadn’t been in contact with other people during that trip. The woman looked older than the man and his gaze towards the camera (on her), full of desire, fascinated me. In my eyes, they were lovers, an atypical couple on a love trip, probably in secret.

I was moved by the abandonment of those photographs, taken and kept with gentleness and affection, and I fantasised about different possibilities for the story, told by that photo-album. My first thought was: this was a forbidden romance! The second: since the attachment to the romantic recollection is more proper to the feminine universe, the guardian of the album was the woman. And the third: after having been kept in secret by her along the time, the album was discarded, with her death.

From that day I started to seek discarded photographs of couples wherever I go. The work presented here is the result of that search: a collection of recurring photos of couples, usually found in family albums in all cultures. ‘Love stories’ that were registered and, in a certain point discontinued, broken and lost.

This is a work in progress where I create fictional narratives from abandoned memories by editing the original pictures, adding color and matching them with new photos of my own, plus texts and other found images. I want to offer narrative for those faded love stories and re-signifying the found records discarded by the end of the relationship, death or some immeasurable embarrassment. My work intends to give the anonymous romances a memory, albeit fictional, to tribute the encounter and the separation of two people motivated by love and passion and, nonetheless fear, death and countless life events.

Found photographs, edited and assembled with post cards, letters and objects